Ivy
My back is against the tile, and I can’t feel my legs.
The water is still running, beating down on both of us, and I’m trying to remember how to breathe.
My chest is heaving. My fingers are gripping his shoulders—when did I grab his shoulders?
—and every nerve in my body is lit up like a circuit board that’s been hit with a surge.
The aftershocks roll through me in slow, involuntary waves, and I hate that I can’t stop them.
I hate that he can see them. I hate that the sound I just made is still hanging in the steam between us. Low, broken. Completely involuntary.
I don’t do involuntary. At least, I didn’t until this morning.
He’s watching me. Those pale blue eyes, close enough that I can see the flecks of gray in them, are steady and calm. Patient, as if he has all the time in the world. Like he didn’t just take me apart with nothing but his hand, and now he’s watching me put myself back together.
The worst part isn’t that he did it. The worst part is how.
When he had me pinned against the wall, when my knee failed and my strategy crumbled, and I was caught with nothing left to throw at him, I expected retaliation.
I expected him to take what he wanted, because that’s what men do in my world.
That’s what I was prepared for. The thing I’ve been trained to endure when a seduction goes wrong and the target takes control.
Yes. They even trained me for that. They trained me to take it. How to take it and lock it away in a part of me that can never be unlocked.
Only he didn’t retaliate the way I was expecting. He could have. Easily. I was pinned, wet, naked, and he was stronger. I can admit that, if only in my own head. He’s stronger. There wasn’t a damn thing stopping him.
Instead of splitting me in half with the redwood he’s packing, he watched my face like he was reading a language only he understood.
When his hand moved, it wasn’t rough. It wasn’t punishing.
It was deliberate and precise, focused entirely on me and what I was feeling.
Like that was the only thing that mattered, no matter what he muttered about punishing me.
I don’t know what to do with that. I literally do not have a framework for processing it.
In my experience, intimacy is a tool. You use your body to gain access, to lower defenses, to extract information.
What just happened wasn’t any of those things.
It wasn’t transactional. He didn’t take anything for himself. He just…
My brain stalls out every time I try to finish that thought.
He steps back, giving me space. The water runs between us, and without his body heat against mine, the shower feels cold despite the steam. I press my palms flat against the tile behind me because my hands are shaking, and I refuse to let him see it. I’ve let him see enough already.
“You okay?” he asks. Quietly. Like he actually cares about the answer.
“Fine.” My voice doesn’t sound fine. It sounds like someone scraped it raw.
He doesn’t push it. He just reaches past me and turns off the water. The sudden silence is deafening. Then he steps out of the shower, grabs a towel from the rack, and comes back to me.
I expect him to hand it to me. He doesn’t.
He wraps it around me himself, and then—slowly, carefully, the way he does everything when it comes to me—he starts drying me off.
My shoulders first. Then my arms, his hands gentle over the scarred skin without lingering or looking away.
Down my back. My hips, where his thumb traces the edge of the birthmark he mentioned earlier, and I feel the touch all through me.
I stand there and let him do it because I don’t know how to stop him. I could pull the towel away, shove him back, reassert some kind of control over a situation that I’ve lost control of completely.
But something keeps me still. Something I don’t want to name.
No one has ever done this for me. No one has ever dried me off like I was something worth taking care of.
Vincenzo trained me to be self-sufficient.
Independent. Hard. Tenderness was not part of the curriculum.
You shower alone, you dress alone, you handle your own body and your own needs because relying on anyone else is weakness.
This doesn’t feel like weakness. I don’t know what it feels like. That’s the problem.
He wraps a second towel around my hair and steps back, giving me room.
Then he grabs a towel for himself and dries off quickly, the way a man does when he wants to get something over with.
I watch the muscles in his back move while he works, and I study the scars there, too.
He has his own collection. A long, thin line across his left shoulder blade that looks like a knife wound.
A puckered circle on his lower back that could be an old bullet graze.
The fresh bandage on his thigh, spotted with pink where the wound seeped during the night, covered in a layer of extra medical tape.
We’re both maps of damage. At least we have that in common.
He pulls on pants and a shirt without looking at me, then disappears into the room. I hear him moving around out there. The clink of dishes. A knock on the door. Room service, maybe. Low voices in the hallway. The door closing again.
When I finally come out of the bathroom with the towel wrapped around me, breakfast is laid out on the small table by the window. Coffee, toast, eggs, fruit. And next to the food, folded neatly on the bed, is a set of clothes.
I pick them up and unfold them. A soft cotton blouse in a floral print.
Pale green and cream. Light fabric, the kind that moves when you walk.
A pair of fitted jeans. Simple white sneakers.
Even underwear, still in the packaging. All of it in my size, which I’m not going to think too hard about right now.
“This is not my style,” I say flatly, holding up the blouse between two fingers like it’s evidence at a crime scene. It is a crime, as far as I’m concerned. The man has piss-poor taste in clothes.
Nick glances over from the table, where he’s pouring coffee. “It used to be.”
Oh, wonderful. This again. Rather than insult his ex-girlfriend’s hideous taste, I settle for, “It isn’t now.”
“Your other option is the clothes you came in last night, which are on the bathroom floor.” He takes a sip of coffee. “Your call.”
I look at the blouse again. The kind of thing a normal woman would wear to brunch or a farmer’s market or whatever the hell normal women do with their weekends. Not the kind of thing a woman who just killed a man on a rooftop last night would put on.
But he’s right. My clothes from last night are wrinkled, stale, and smell like a combination of sedative sweat and hotel carpet. I didn’t exactly pack an overnight bag before breaking into his room.
I drop the towel without a word, since modesty seems pointless at this juncture, and pull on the clothes.
The fabric is softer than anything I’ve worn in years.
Everything I own is black, tactical, and chosen for function.
This blouse feels like a different language against my skin. It fits annoyingly well.
When I look at myself in the mirror hanging on the back of the closet door, I barely recognize the woman staring back. She looks... normal. Young. Like someone who has never held a rifle or a blade or the life of another human being in her hands.
She looks like a stranger.
I don’t like it. I don’t like what it implies about who he thinks I am. Who he wants me to be.
But I sit down at the table and eat breakfast anyway, because I’m starving, and my body needs fuel, and refusing food out of spite would be childish at best, stupid at worst. The coffee is mediocre; the eggs are passable, and the toast is toast. I eat without looking at him, focusing on the mechanics of chewing and swallowing.
I most definitely do not think about the shower.
We eat in silence for a while. It’s almost domestic. The thought makes me want to throw my coffee cup at the wall.
He sips his own coffee before setting the cup down. “We’ll need to leave here by noon for the airstrip.”
And my blood runs cold, right on schedule. I grip my cup tight, but that’s nothing compared to my clenched jaw. “I told you. I’m not getting on a plane with you.”
Something about flying—the thought of being sealed inside a metal tube, thirty thousand feet above the ground, with no exits and no options—tightens my chest in a way I refuse to acknowledge.
It’s not fear. I don’t do fear. It’s a rational aversion to a confined space from which there is no escape. That’s completely different.
Nick looks at me over the rim of his cup. “You’ll either walk onto that jet on your own two feet, or I’ll sedate you and carry you on. Either way, you’re coming with me.”
“That’s kidnapping.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
He sets down his cup. “Call it what you want. I made a promise, and I’m keeping it. Your brother is waiting for you. I’m bringing you home.”
Before I can respond, something buzzes on the desk. My phone. I left it in my jacket pocket last night, and he must have set it aside with the rest of my things. The screen lights up with a notification. A text from an unknown number.
My handler.
I look at Nick. He looks at the phone. Neither of us moves for a long moment.
“That’s work,” I offer.
“I know what it is.”
“I have a job. A new one, apparently.” I don’t reach for the phone, but I nod toward it. “I can’t just leave. I work for the Russos. I owe them my life.”
Something dark moves through his expression. Not anger. It’s something colder. “You don’t owe them a goddamn thing.”
“They raised me. They trained me. They gave me—”
“A purpose. Yeah, you keep saying that, too.” He leans forward, forearms on his knees. “What kind of purpose, exactly? Killing people for money? Being sent to seduce targets? Is that the life you’re grateful for?”
The words land hard. Much harder than I want him to know. I keep my face neutral, because that’s what I do, but something aches in my gut. An uncomfortable pressure, like a door being forced open. “It’s the only life I know.”
“It doesn’t have to be.”
“You don’t get to decide that for me.” I hold his gaze, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel.
“You don’t understand how this works. You don’t just walk away from the Russos.
That’s not how it’s done. People who try to leave end up dead.
People who help them leave end up worse.
” Not that it matters either way. I’m not trying to spare his life. Even if he’s spared mine.
He’s quiet for a beat, studying me. Then he says, “How do you think I knew you were alive?”
I blink. “What?”
“How do you think I found out you were still alive in the first place? That you were out here, working for them?”
I don’t answer, because I don’t know. I assumed Liam, if he exists, had sources. Connections. People in the right places asking the right questions. That’s how intelligence works.
“Gabriel told me,” Nick says. “Gabriel Russo. He’s the one who confirmed you were alive and pointed me in this direction. He knew I was coming to look for you.”
I process that. Gabriel. Not Vincenzo. Gabriel, with the easy smile and the charm that makes you forget he’s every bit as dangerous as his father. Gabriel, who runs operations in the States because his father can’t show his face there.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I insist, but my voice has lost some of its edge. “Gabriel does what Gabriel does. It’s Vincenzo who holds the strings. Vincenzo is the one who decides who stays and who goes, and he won’t let me go. Not willingly.”
“Let me worry about Vincenzo.”
A sound escapes me that’s almost a laugh. Almost. “You have no idea what you’re up against.”
“I have a pretty good idea, actually.”
“No. You don’t.” I lean back in my chair and fold my arms. The floral blouse bunches at my elbows, and I resist the urge to rip it off and demand my own clothes back.
“Vincenzo Russo is not someone you negotiate with. You don’t threaten or outmaneuver him.
He’s someone who makes problems disappear.
When he finds out I’ve been taken—and he will find out—he won’t send a polite email asking for my return. ”
Nick holds my gaze, unbothered in a way that’s either incredibly brave or catastrophically stupid. Maybe even insane. “I said, let me worry about it.”
“Fine.” I pick up my coffee and take a sip, settling back in my chair again. “Worry about it all you want. I’m sure Vincenzo will be very accommodating when he comes to collect me.”
I say it lightly, casually, like it’s a joke. But it isn’t. Vincenzo will come. Or he’ll send someone. And whoever Nick Brooks is, whatever training he has, whatever promises he made to a brother I don’t remember—none of it will matter when the Russos decide to take back what’s theirs.
He’ll learn. They all do.
I just hope I’m not the one who has to watch.
The thought catches me off guard. The implication that I would care if something happened to him. I shove it down, hard, and focus on my coffee. It gives me something to do with my hands that isn’t reaching across the table and doing something I’d regret.
Like touching him. Like letting him touch me again.
The phone buzzes a second time on the desk. My handler, following up, probably wondering where the hell I am since I’m normally on top of things.
And I ignore it. I ignore a direct communication from the Russos, and the fact that it doesn’t feel as wrong as it should is the most unsettling thing that’s happened to me since I woke up in handcuffs.
Which is saying something, since all it takes is a casual glance toward the bathroom to make my blood hum.
Nick watches me not answer the phone. Something moves through his expression. It’s not quite a smile, but close. Like he sees something I’m not ready to admit.
I have to look away.